About freetext.net

Who we are

freetext.net is yet another site offering free e-texts for you to read online or to download. But why should you come here, rather than going to any of the others? In two words: added value.

• We provide quality e-texts: proof-read and beautifully formatted, in formats suitable both for reading on-screen and for printing out.
• We introduce you to the authors and their works: biographies of the authors, critical appreciations of the works and (soon) time-lines, help put things into context. You gain a sense of perspective, an understanding of the influences and circumstances that moulded a writer's output, and of the significance of their works.

Think of us as a cross between a library, an encyclopaedia, and a university. Come here to learn about authors and their works, and come here to read them.

Where we are now

freetext.net has been live about eighteen months. It is an experiment in the automated production of a web site from a database of authors and works and a set of XML-formatted texts and summaries. We went online with one text on December 1st, 1999. From then until now we have been finalising the layout and presentation of the site, improving the automated build tools, and preparing a few new texts.

Where we are going

From now on our aim is to add a new, proof-read, formatted e-text, together with supporting documentation on the author and the work, each week in the first year, as well as supporting new file formats as time and technology allows. For the next several months freetext.net will not have enough works to need to organise them other than by author and by title, but in future authors and works will be indexed by date, subject, style, school, country or culture, and language. We will also be adding new file formats: Adobe's PDF format, perhaps also Star Office 5.1 Text Document format, and certainly an e-book format or two.

What you will need

A modern browser, as all the pages on this site, and all of the works, are marked up in HTML 4.0 (transitional), and use CSS2 style-sheets; our document encoding is UTF-8. Some browsers that claim to implement HTML 4.0 do so with varying degrees of success; freetext.net however will not be making any concessions.

• Our reference browser is the new Mozilla, which has the best standards-compliance we have seen.
• The next best, but only available on the Windows and Macintosh platforms, is Internet Explorer 5. Internet Explorer 4 is only slightly less satisfactory.
• On Unix we recommend the latest version of Netscape. We do find, however, that on our unmodified RedHat Linux 6.0 box with Netscape Communicator 4.51, the appearance of the site and the texts is completely unsatisfactory (its habit of putting question marks for Unicode characters that it does not understand, such as em-dashes, ellipses and curly quotes is, in the context of a literary site, somewhat unfortunate). We are working on a set of recommendations, and as soon as we know, we will put an update here.
• Sadly, we can't recommend Opera since, though it manages a fine representation of the style sheets, our copy (version 3.60 on Windows 98) completely fails with respect to UTF-8.

If your browser is at all recent, it may cope with UTF-8 (an encoding of an international character set, required to support works in many different languages) automatically; with some older versions of Netscape however it may be necessary to manually specify the document encoding via View / Character Set / Unicode (UTF-8).